Social Networking – MySpace

A: It is well established, as the first-to-market social network. It has hundreds of thousands of users. It is owned by News Corporation, which (in “normal” economic times) gives it pretty deep pockets.

Q: What does MySpace have going against it?

A: Almost everything else.

I am one of those 30-somethings turned off by MySpace because of its early reputation.

Nonetheless, I finally joined – mostly just to educate myself about it.

These are my immediate thoughts.

It’s (still) ugly.

It’s crowded.

I could not find any useful applications that integrate other social networking tools into your profile (i.e. Twitter).

It’s easy to pick on MySpace, so I don’t want to sound like one of the usual folks. Until a week ago, I honestly never even looked at it for more than a minute or two.

MySpace has much going for it in that they are well established, and drew a crowd early on. If they want to beat FaceBook in the long run, though, they need to start being smarter. I can imagine there are numerous “legacy” issues as they try to take an application built in one “era” and transform it into the new “era”, and all the distractions this creates – compared to FaceBook who understood the business model, and did it right the first time.

I won’t say MySpace is useless, or that it doesn’t have a bright future. But I will say that it has many issues to overcome if it wants to be relevant in this new social media era.

I will also say that I have no intention of using it seriously any time soon. Then again, I’m not the main target audience.